Current planetary aspects

What an aspect between two planets is

Take two geocentric longitudes and subtract them. If the difference is within a few degrees of 0°, 60°, 90°, 120° or 180°, the pair is in aspect — conjunction, sextile, square, trine or opposition, the five Ptolemaic angles the transit terminal uses — and the distance from the exact angle is the orb. That is all the grid is: forty-five pairs, five angles, and a 3° envelope, the same envelope the product applies to a transit against a chart. Nothing about a birth is involved, which is what makes it the sky's own weather.

Applying, separating, and the rate

Every row has a direction. An applying aspect is one whose orb is closing — the page projects each body one hour ahead on its current speed and asks whether the angle got nearer to exact — and a separating one has already perfected. The direction matters less than the rate. Sun and Mercury close their separation at about 1.03° a day, so a 2.64° orb is a matter of days — exact 27 Aug 2026, 17:03 UTC; Neptune and Pluto move 0.002° a day relative to each other, so their 0.18° orb, exact 16 Sep 2026, 02:00 UTC, is a configuration that stays within orb for a season and comes back the following year. The exact-instants table below turns each applying row into a time.

Slow pairs and fast pairs

The grid is really two grids laid over each other. 4 of the 5 rows are between outer planets — Neptune sextile Pluto, Uranus sextile Neptune, Jupiter trine Saturn, Uranus trine Pluto — and those are the aspects that colour years: they perfect, drift apart in retrograde, perfect again, and hold within orb across whole seasons. The rest involve the Sun, Mercury, Venus or Mars, and they pass in days. The tradition reads the slow configuration as the character of a period shared by everyone alive in it, and the fast contacts as the events of a week; both are collective. Neither says where they land for any one person.

Planet-to-planet is not planet-to-chart

A sky aspect is between two moving bodies. A transit is between one moving body and a fixed point in a birth chart, and that is a different geometry with a different answer for every chart: the Sun at 1.9° Virgo is square something in one chart and nothing in the next. The terminal is where this grid becomes personal — the same five angles and the same 3° orb, applied to your natal points instead of to the planets — and the handoff below opens it.

What the instrument claims

It computes the angles, sorts them by orb, reads the direction from the speed channel and dates the exact instants ahead. It does not say what a Jupiter–Saturn trine brings, and it does not add the aspects up into a score for the day.